Today I got to be a tourist in Beijing. I walked the two or three miles from the hotel to Tiananmen Square, toured the Forbidden City, and explored the backstreets and alleyways. I took a couple of hundred photos, but I don’t have the bandwidth to upload them all yet. This teaser will have to do.
Around 2 pm, I wound up at a Starbucks near Ritan Park, and found that they had free WiFi. I turned on my iPhone, and was amused to discover that although Google Maps refused to show me a street-level map of Beijing, the satellite image view worked perfectly, and pinpointed my location within 10 metres!
When I told friends about this, they teased me about going to Starbucks. This is unfair: I have been sampling plenty of local cuisine. Starbucks was a move of desperation: the first place I’d seen to sit down and have a cold drink in about 30 minutes of pounding the pavement.
Yesterday I went out to dinner with two Amazon colleagues, and we had Shark’s Fin Soup. Yes, I know it’s environmentally irresponsible – but on the other hand it was one of the few items on the English version of the menu (hand-written in a school exercise book!) that we could identify. That and the eel stir-fried with mushrooms. And various dishes including the word “testicles”… (It was a strange evening all around: we wound up as the only customers in a quaint bar called “The Buffalo”, drinking weak cocktails and listening to an atrocious singer mangling Carpenters’ songs.)
On Tuesday I went to a fast food place near the office for lunch; it was decorated with pictures of Jackie Chan,and looked innocuous. I picked what I thought looked safe, and emerged 20 minutes later certain only of the identity of two elements of the meal: rice, and mushrooms. All of the other 5 or 6 ingredients were completely unknown to me, by appearance or taste. The next day I went with a colleague to a huge underground food court, and I just said “I’ll have what you’re having.” There was fried rice, and a hard boiled egg, but after that I’m hazy…..
Hotel breakfast is either dim sum (individual items unidentified) or stuff that looks like ham and eggs but doesn’t taste like either.
I’m having a great time!
OK, here are a couple of buses, just for Susan:
